Sports Writers

"[M]y doctor... told me, "A breathing class could help." ...strengthen my failing lungs, calm my frazzled mind, maybe give me perspective."

"The whales welcomed them into their pods, started shooting them with echolocation to figure out what they were, and then started shooting them with... communication clicks. ...[T]his lasted for a series of days ..."

"[T]he lowest recorded heart rate [of a free diver]... was 7 beats per minute... about 1/2 of someone in a ..."

"Truebridge just dove thirty stories... all on one lungfull of air... The pressure... is more than ten times that at the surface, strong enough to crush a Coke can. At thirty feet. the lungs collapse to hald their normal size; at three hundred feet they shrink to the size of two baseballs. ...The dives don't look forced... as if they all really belong down there. As if we all do."

"The sperm whale's brain is about 6 times the size of ours... They've had it for 15 million year longer... We've had our current size brain around 200,000 years."

"I'd just recovered from pneumonia, which I'd also had the year before and the year before that. I was... wheezing, working, and eating... in a rut—physically, mentally [etc.]"

"Lilly... wanted to... figure out the communication code. He said these animals are by far the most intelligent... on the planet. They have a form of communication that is far more sophisticated than ours. But you can't quite put a 60 foot long whale into a lab."

"The ocean is the last truly quiet place left on Earth."

"Back in the 60s... John Lilly had a lab... dedicated to solving the dolphin communication problem..."

"So for the past 50 years we've been... studying these animals from the deck of a boat. Now this is very limiting. You can't see... you... have to put... s off the deck... But... they've found... that... sperm whales have dialects... they can shoot this click communication in focused sound beams to other whales across great distances... [T]hese sperm whales can cram 1600 micro-clicks into a single second... and move discreet frequencies around..."

"These animals came up to us, welcomed us into their pods and started showering us with these clicks."

"Scientists call it the mammalian dive reflex or...the Master Switch of Life, and they've been researching it for... fifty years. ...[C]oined by Per Scholander ...it refers to variety of physiological reflexes in the brain, lungs, heart [etc.] that are triggered the second we put our face in the water. The deeper... the more pronounced... Ancient cultures... employed it... to harvest sponges, pearls, coral and food hudreds of feet below the surface of the ocean..."

"I swam with these animals about 4 years ago. Some friends and I had heard that off the coast of Sri Lanka these huge congregations of s would gather in March and April."

"I found out later that these clicks are actually used for communication. These animals also use them to see in the deep ocean. ...It's a form of called echolocation."

"If you compare the ocean to the human body... current exploration... is equivalent to snapping a photograph of a finger..."

"At three hundred feet... pressure... is ten times that at the surface. ...The organs collapse. The heart beats at a quarter of its normal rate, slower than... in a . Senses disappear. The brain enters a dream state."

"Inside of these clicks is encoded information... a secret language..."

"[T]he more you focus in on these clicks, the tinier... they get, [growing] into more complex structures. ...[O]ther ns such as dolphins and orcas also use these. It's this secret language... discrete codes... down to the millisecond."

"He had a dolphin telephone... and he would listen in as these dolphins would have these very complex conversations..."

"He... had dolphin English language immersion workshops... where... an intern [would] grant dolphins sexual favors if they learned English words, and this... worked."

"[A] few years ago a French researcher and a Belgian freediver... thought "What if we try freediving with whales? Maybe we could get close enough... and start communicating...""

"[A]fter around 30 feet... the water stops buoying you... and starts dragging you down to the sea floor. ...[T]he deeper ...the more your body changes. ...Your organs allow for the free flow of fluids so they don't collapse. Your brain waves slow down. Your heart rate will slow to about 1/3 its resting rate."

"The animals are usually very wary of scuba but... they saw something similar to themselves. ...[W]hales also have mammalian dive reflexes. That's how they're able to dive down to 8,000 feet for 90 minutes..."

"[T]he divers were able to commune with these animals for hours... and get footage that no one else has ever gotten."

"[I]f we're able to understand just the rudiments of this communication, we may be able to save them. ...70% of the population is gone, and it's declining very quickly."

"Japan and Iceland... want to keep hunting sperm whales, and are petitioning to do that... [I]f we're able to prove their intelligence and their capacity for communication we might be able to establish them some... rights."

"A group of scientists, acoustic engineers and free divers have... the goal of trying to crack the sperm whale communication code in the next 2 years. ...We're going to use and AI algorithms... We're already doing this with mice... bats..."

"[F]or the first time... in human history we have the technology and... methods to... understand these animals and crack into their code..."

"[T]he voice of a man... flowed from the speakers... too melodious to sound natural... instructed me to inhale slowly through our noses, then exhale slowly. To focus on our breath."

"[S]omething happened. ...[I]t was as if I'd been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else. It happened in an instant. ...I had somehow sweated through my clothes as if I'd just run a marathon."

"I went to Greece to write a story on ... When most people go underwater... they bail out at ten feet... ears screaming. The freedivers told me they'd previously been "most people." ...To freedive, they said, all anyone had to do was master the art of breathing."

""There are as many ways to breath as there are foods to eat," said one... instructor... Another diver told me that some methods of breathing will nourish our brains... others hasten our death."

"I looked for... verification... recent research in ... but found next to nothing... breathing technique wasn't important. ...Pulmonologists work mainly on ...maladies of the lungs ...collapse, cancer, emphysema."

"[B]reathing research has been taking place... in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites... dental offices, and... mental hospitals."

"[C]oaches in the 50s used to have their runners take a... mouthful of water, run around the track and then spit out that same amount of water... to force them to breath through their nose.... to move their diaphragms... more, because breathing is so essential to their recovery... endurance, and performance."

"25-50% of the population... breath through their mouth. ...[This causes] neurological problems... respiratory problems... snoring, , even s [etc.]"

"The doctor of speech, language pathology at Stanford... measured people who had laryngectomies... She found between 2 months and 2 years, their noses were completely blocked."

"We know that the more you breath through your nose, the more that it's going to open... [P]eople who are habitual mouth breathers, who are also joggers... start breathing through the nose. In the beginning it's really... hard... then weeks... months go by and their noses open up... [T]he benefits... they're innumerable... not only oxygen, but it helps defend your body, humidifies... conditions air [etc.]"

"[B]reathing has to be considered along with diet and exercise as a pillar of health, because even if you eat keto, vegan, paleo, whatever. Even if you exercise all the time, if you're not breathing right, you're never going to be healthy. We know that to be the truth."

"If you were to take [a billiard ball]... and... imagine just pushing it inside your head, that's about the volume of your nose and all your sinus cavities. ...[T]hey even stretch out above your eyes... [T]hey call it the because it looks exactly like a seashell."

"[T]he nose... produces... nitric oxide... a that plays an essential role in oxygen delivery and also helps battle... viruses, bacteria and other pathogens."

"[T]his is all happening in the nose. In slowing down that air all of these other functions allow us to gain 20% more oxygen breathing through the nose than... through the mouth."

"You can overbreath. When people at a gym or... jogging... [through heavy panting] you're offloading... too much CO2. You're causing constriction in your circulation. ...If you were to breath 30 deep breaths, you'll feel some tingling in your head... maybe your fingertips... your toes will get cool. That's not from an increase in oxygen, it's the opposite... a decrease in circulation."

"[Y]our body wants to be in balance... the right amount of CO2 and oxygen for optimum delivery, and that's what the nose helps you to do."

"[T]hese clicks are so loud you can actually feel them in your body. Your body starts heating up after a few minutes."

"They're able to see better with sounds than we are able to see with our eyes."

"But they could not crack the communication code. To do that you have to get below the surface. You have to see these animals... to gauge their behavior."

"Most people take breathing for granted. ...James Nestor's new book about how breathing properly can transform your physical and mental health, feels eerily well-timed. It lays out how we breath incorrectly or at least fail to maximize our potential."

"I... signed up for an introductory course in breathing to learn... Sudarshan Kriya."

"Even if someone has a pulse-ox or... a monitor, you can breath in certain ways and instantly see what it does to your body."